About ODSL

Building practical digital products for real African markets.

Since 2016, we have iterated through multiple platforms - learning fast, shipping both in-house and for our esteemed external clients, and building systems that work across USSD, SMS, and web channels.


Foundation

Our Purpose, Goal and Values

The principles that shape how we build, deliver, and continuously improve every platform we launch.

Our Purpose

To make digital platforms more accessible, practical, and sustainable for organizations and communities across Zambia and beyond.

Our Goal

To continuously deliver reliable, measurable platforms that help clients engage customers, simplify operations, and unlock growth.

Our Values

  • Practical innovation
  • Ownership and accountability
  • Sustainable delivery
  • Data-informed decisions

How We Ship In-House

For internal products, we own the full lifecycle end-to-end: product discovery, technical architecture, development, QA, deployment, monitoring, and iteration. This allows us to move fast, test improvements continuously, and keep platforms aligned with local market realities.

How We Deliver for External Clients

For client-facing projects, we run a structured delivery model: requirements alignment, scoped implementation, milestone-based releases, and post-launch support. We collaborate closely with business teams, marketing teams, and operations teams to ensure each solution is practical, measurable, and sustainable.


Our evolution

Timeline of product growth

Each milestone reflects how we adapted to market realities and refined our model around scalability, cost efficiency, and long-term product value.

2026

EventsNet and SchoolsPay

We introduced EventsNet to help organizers sell tickets and manage events end-to-end digitally. We also launched SchoolsPay to help schools accept digital payments from parents in a secure and user-friendly way.

2024

Farmer-Switch

We launched Farmer-Switch as an in-house platform connecting farmers, input suppliers, lenders, insurers, and markets. Users access services through web and USSD (*789#) for functions like market prices, financing access, and ecosystem coordination. The platform is active and continues to evolve.

2020

Switch Platform

We launched Switch for SMS/USSD promotions and campaigns, with bulk messaging, a statistics engine, and a web dashboard for promo administration. This became our first major traction product, including live USSD campaigns on *262# and large-scale SMS promotions for 2NT7 via shortcode 4501.

2018

Tele-School (USSD + SMS Quiz Platform)

We built Tele-School with a web dashboard for administration and performance tracking. Despite strong concept value, high shortcode, SMS, and hosting costs prevented the product from scaling.

2016

Web Bus Ticketing Platform

We launched our first product: a web-based bus ticketing system. It was later decommissioned because usage required internet access and deployment/hosting costs were too high to sustain operations at the time.